Headline

Director of Engineering | Omnichannel Customer Service SaaS | Building AI-first products at Hiver | IIT Delhi

About

I build engineering organizations that do more with less — and have the receipts to prove it. Before Hiver, I spent a decade across high-traffic B2C platforms — Expedia's global travel platform (tier 1 Order Management, distributed messaging systems, millions of daily transactions), OLX, CarDekho, and an early-stage Singapore startup where I was part of a 5-person founding engineering team. That era taught me what scale actually demands: not just good architecture, but systems that hold at 3am and teams that own outcomes, not just tickets. At Hiver — four years, three chapters: 2022–2024 · Email Platform Led Hiver's core Gmail-based B2B platform — 5M+ emails/day, 30M+ outbound events synced daily. Took reliability and throughput from a scaling problem to a competitive moat. 2025 · Hiver AI Led the AI charter — partnered closely with customers, contributed to PLG strategy, and drove engineering across AI Tagging (precision 70% → 96%, 400+ hours saved), AI Sentiments (100 → 400 paid accounts), and AskAI RAG system (quality 61% → 89%). 2026 · Hiver Omni Building Hiver's omnichannel customer service platform for enterprise — email, chat, voice and more in one product. Zero-to-one: from architecture to first paying customers. Across all three chapters: the org went from 38 to 24 engineers — not through cuts, but through AI-driven efficiency. Fewer people, more output, higher ownership. That's the kind of engineering culture I try to create everywhere I go. 16 years across B2C scale and B2B SaaS. IIT Delhi. Ex-Expedia. Open to conversations on engineering leadership, AI in SaaS, or building outcome-driven orgs.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

Work experience

Director of Engineering at Hiver, Jun 2025 - Present · 1 yr 4 mos, Bengaluru, Scope expanded from Email Platform to Hiver's full AI charter, then to Omni — the company's next growth surface. Two distinct chapters within this role. 2025 · Hiver AI Objective: Establish AI as a validated, revenue-contributing product line with meaningful paid customer adoption across Hiver's B2B base. Led engineering across Hiver's AI capabilities. Operated closely with enterprise customers — participating in customer calls, translating feedback into product decisions, and contributing to the PLG motion for AI adoption. · AI Tagging: precision 70% → 96%, 174k+ tags, 400+ hours saved, adoption 50 → 150 accounts · AI Sentiments: adoption 100 → 400 paid accounts, 30+ automation workflows activated · AskAI (RAG): 22 enterprise customers, 100 queries/week, quality 61% → 89% · AI Extract: 200+ extractions/day · Contributed to 50+ AI customer wins through direct customer engagement 2026 · Hiver Omni Objective: Build and validate Hiver's omnichannel platform as an enterprise-grade product with a growing base of paying customers contributing to durable ARR. Leading zero-to-one build of Hiver's omnichannel customer service platform — email, chat, and voice in one enterprise product. Responsible for engineering strategy, team design, and delivery from architecture to first paying customers. Org efficiency across both chapters: Reduced engineering org from 38 to 24 — not through layoffs, but through AI-driven tooling, automation, and process redesign. Same output velocity. Higher ownership. Leaner structure.

Senior Engineering Manager at Hiver, Jun 2022 - Jun 2025 · 3 yrs 1 mo, Built the engineering foundation that Hiver's core B2B platform runs on today. Owned the Email Channel Engineering org — the multi-tenant Gmail-based platform powering Hiver's collaboration, SLAs, analytics, automations, and billing. Joined with a team of 7. Left it at 35, with delivery predictability transformed from a chronic problem to a strength. Objective: Scale the Email Platform to handle Hiver's growing customer base reliably while building an engineering org capable of sustained, predictable delivery. Key outcomes: · Scaled org 7 → 15 in 7 months (zero attrition), then to 35 within 24 months · Platform scaled to 5M+ emails/day and 30M+ outbound sync events daily · Reduced latency 200s → 55s; cleared stuck event backlog from 1B → <5k/day · Delivered RabbitMQ → Sync Core architectural split for long-term scalability · Improved delivery predictability <50% → 90%; established daily release culture · Built Watchdog observability platform enabling data-first engineering decisions Promoted to Director of Engineering in June 2025.

Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering at Expedia Group, May 2021 - Jun 2022 · 1 yr 2 mos, Gurugram, Haryana, India, Led the API First initiative for next generation Travel platform for Expedia group - built tier 1 Order Management System built on AWS cloud native technologies, handling order orchestration and asynchronous events coming out of each transaction for end to end event journey & asynchronous processing. Achievements in this role: • Accomplished a very good level of team engagement at the Expedia Group. Leading from the front in delivering the next generation API First Travel Platform enabling external developer communities • One Team, Group First: Fostered good work culture in the team where people stand for each other and work as One team. • Team Building: Retained and Re-hired good engineers for team. Developed cordial relations with peers in order to handle attrition situations better. • Agile Practices: Streamlined Agile methodologies in the team where in individuals are aware about various aspects of the development life cycle and take ownership of the process end to end. The vision is to create a self-reliant team, equipped to handle ambiguity well. • Turned around the Expedia internal guaranteed messaging platform & gained better engagement and trust from the various stakeholders including the senior management at the Expedia Group • Actively involved in design discussions, code reviews and problem solving. Hands on with latest development happening on the services I am leading.

Senior Software Development Engineer at Expedia Group, Mar 2021 - May 2021 · 3 mos, Gurugram, Haryana, India, Built & was part of core patent winning engineering team who delivered architectural revamp of enterprise messaging platform enabling 2 $mn USD cost savings per annum. Entire redesign was done on AWS cloud native technologies using pay-per-use methodologies against legacy system built on reserved instances and resource heavy technologies like Cassandra, Apache Strom, Hadoop etc. My role was to focus on re-designing Event Traceability of the system using AWS Glue & AWS Athena, redesigning optimised Logging system using AWS Kinesis and to fan out logs to Spunk, Firebase & S3 using AWS Lambda.

SDE III at Expedia Group, Nov 2017 - Feb 2021 · 3 yrs 4 mos, Gurugram, Haryana, India, As part of core engineering team for Expedia Group's core enterprise internal messaging system, I got the firsthand opportunity to build a large-scale distributed system (a guaranteed message delivery system aka Transaction Bridge) which is highly available, scalable and reliable platform built with open source technologies like Cassandra, Apache Storm, Kafka, ElasticSearch. My Role was to actively contribute in designing & executing features on this platform, including a self service portal which reduced time to onboard a customer from 7 days to 5 mins. I was heavily involved in multiple feature development on both Frontend and Backend. Learned the first hand designing experience of distributed systems with some of the best Architects ExpediaGroup had.

Software Development Manager at CarDekho, Jun 2015 - Mar 2017 · 1 yr 10 mos, Jaipur Area, India, Team: PriceDekho.com is price comparison engine in peripheral e-commerce segment helping customers in taking buying decision. • Led team of 10 developers in analysis and rebuild of product from design through completion using SDLC methodologies • Trained engineers in standards and strategies for optimal product development. Led Sprint planning, reviews and retrospective meetings • Collaborated with leadership (Founder & COO) to define strategies, requirements & build projects that achieved Product milestones including internationalisation & process automation

Technology Lead at OLX Group, Dec 2014 - Jun 2015 · 7 mos, Gurugram, Haryana, India, I was part of the new engineering team setup by OLX group in India in 2014. Worked on understanding & exploring in-house fraud detection framework which had complex rules parsing the content created by User and then flagging based on a rules engine. We worked on caching experiments for this high traffic platform which increased response time of fraud detection service by 10x.

Technology Lead at GeckoLife, Mar 2013 - Dec 2014 · 1 yr 10 mos, New Delhi Area, India, Singapore based startup in social networking domain. Part of first 5 members of team. Set up processes, coding standards & development cycle for Tech team. Provided Technical leadership to engineering team, successfully designed architecture & DB from scratch & delivered product in less than 100 days

SDE2 at 99acres.com, Apr 2011 - Feb 2013 · 1 y 10 mo, Noida

SDE1 at Mobicule Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Oct 2009 - Apr 2011 · 1 y 6 mo, Noida

Education

B.Tech, Textiles, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi